The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great LoveGlaspell, Susan
General
The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love
Glaspell, Susan
Artists -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Love stories; Married people -- Fiction; Scientists -- Fiction
"You? I know you're not. Some ancestor of yours gave you a big bump of
stubbornness--for which you should look back to him with gratitude.
Stubborn people aren't easily put out of the race. Now I'll tell you why
I wanted you to come down here," he went on, more seriously. "I want you
to see the thing just as it is. I want you to get the conception of it as
a whole. I don't want you to become short-sighted. Some people look so
much through the microscope that they forget how to look any other way.
That's the difference between Karl and some of those fellows you're
associated with now. That Willard and Lane and young Beason are the
scientific kind, too abominably scientific to forge ahead. Don't lose
sight of what you are doing. All these things you are doing now are
simply a means to an end. You are to be one of the instruments
employed--as you put it yourself one day--but make yourself such a
highly-organised, responsive instrument that you're fairly alive with the
idea yourself. See? That's where your real value will come in. You
know,"--it was Dr. Parkman now who breathed the enthusiasm which draws
one to a light out beyond obstacle and difficulty--"I'm beginning to see
the thing more and more as actual fact. I caught the idea from the first,
and then it seemed it simply had to be done because it was such a great
thing to do, but I'm getting it more and more now just as a practical,
matter-of-fact thing. And it isn't so far away,--not so very. You see,
after all, Mrs. Hubers, you don't have to do it all. It would be stupid
to set a race horse at a job that could be just as well accomplished by a
plug. Any well-trained man can do certain things for Karl--but it's the
touch of the artist--the things that make it real--it's making the blind
man see--doing the impossible!--that's your work. Why, I can fairly see
the whole thing," he went on--"Karl and you and some good assistant.
He'll get both points of view then--he can't miss anything. The other
fellow can give him certain technicalities you might miss--and then
you'll turn in and bring it to his vision. A clear statement of facts
could never make a blind man see. And then it will be your business to
keep the spirit right--that's the real point, after all. Why, I can see
it just as clearly as I could see that work to be done in there!"--
pointing to the operating room.
It was another Ernestine now. She rose to it as the warrior to the
trumpet call. He knew that the right word had been said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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